Archive | January, 2016

After lots and lots of research, I finally made a decision to purchase a crossbow. I had used a friend’s Excalibur crossbow in the fall and took a doe with it in Wisconsin, where crossbows are legal for all hunters with an archery license.

I enjoyed it so much, I decided I wanted one for myself. I shot several and really liked ones made by Parker. They have two lower-priced models that are nearly identical — the Enforcer and the Bushwacker. The former sells for $500, the latter for $400.

That’s low when it comes to crossbows, but still more than I had hoped to pay. I was hoping to pay $300 or less, but the more research I did, the less that seemed possible. I did see one for less than $300, but a guy in the archery department at Cabela’s advised against it. He was high on Parker crossbows, saying he does not see them get returned, plus they are made in the U.S. with a lifetime warranty.

I tried one out in two different stores, and they just felt good in my hands. The next task was trying to find the lowest price possible.

Today, I got a nice blessing when a guy from Parker emailed me that the company had some older Bushwackers (pre-2015) that they were closing out. The price was great — $225. Needless to say, I jumped all over that and ordered one right away.

It should come in the next week or two. I’m excited to use it, and may try it in Wisconsin during the turkey season this spring. One landowner where I hunt only allows bow hunting, so I’ll be good to go on his property with my new crossbow. Plus, I likely will be the only turkey hunter on his land this spring.

I can’t wait to try it. And, of course, I will use it in the fall. My journey to crossbow ownership all started with some nagging shoulder pain that significantly influenced shooting with my compound. Now, I have the option of using the crossbow in Wisconsin. And, at age 54, I only have a few more years to reach the age requirement of 60 in Minnesota for crossbow use.

I’ll be sure to follow up with more information about how the new crossbow shoots. Stay tuned!

Although temperatures were in the low 20s, Ken Cobian — double hip replacements and all — joined in both the annual Jan. 22 Prayer Service for Life at the Cathedral of St. Paul and the March for Life down to the State Capitol. Bob Zyskowski/The Catholic Spirit

Two new hips and all, Ken Cobian walked from the annual Jan. 22 Prayer Service for Life at the Cathedral of St. Paul down to the March for Life rally at the Minnesota State Capitol.

I first spotted him with his gray and blue knitted cap pulled over his ears as he slowly but steadily made his way back up St. Paul’s Cathedral Hill, Prolife Across America poster in hand, at the end of the rally.

Cobian, retired from his job as a material scientist at Medtronics, stopped back in the Cathedral to warm up before heading home, which was where I caught up to him.

I asked the question I’ve been asking folks at this Jan. 22 event since the first one back in 1974, when snowflakes kept smearing the ink on the notes I was taking outside the federal building in Peoria, Illinois: “Why is it important for you to be here today?”

Cobian had a ready answer, just as people have had since 1974: “I’m very much opposed to abortion, ever since I saw my children born years ago. That turned the light on for me.”

A parishioner with his wife, Susan, of St. Charles Borromeo in St. Anthony, Cobian earned a chemistry degree at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and did graduate work at both the University of Minnesota and at UCLA. Like some in the science fields, at one point he had turned away from his faith, he admitted. “My wife brought me back,” he said. “She’s my rock.”

He was at the pro-life rally two years ago, too, he said, but last year he couldn’t make it because he was in the midst of having hip replacements on both sides. “I’m fine now,” he said. “It’s nothing compared to the sin of abortion.”

He grabbed his hat to leave. “I’ve got to get home and get cleaned up,” Cobian said. “We’ve got a pro-life Mass tonight at St. Charles.”

May God bless you with DISCOMFORT
at easy answers, half truths and superficial relationships,
that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with holy ANGER
at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,
That you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with TEARS
to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection,
starvation and war, that you may reach out your hand to
comfort them, turning their pain to joy.

May God bless you with enough FOOLISHNESS
to believe that you can make a difference in this world,
doing what others claim cannot be done.

CASFA and Cristo Rey students at dispensary praying before serving elderly. Photo by Shelly Gill Murray

An unlikely partner resides a hemisphere away where mountains hover over a city in a bowl of ten million people, Bogota Colombia is intimately connected to Minnesota. Fifty years ago Franciscan Sisters of Our Lady of Lourdes from Rochester, Minnesota opened a convent in Bogota. They then started an all-girls school called Colegio Santa Francisca Romana or “PACHAS” now considered one of the top ten schools in Bogota. Thirty years ago, they added a second school, Colegio Anexo San Francisco de Asis or “CASFA,” for children with limited resources. CASFA students walk up and down the mountain to school every day. They work to learn professional skills and go to school six days a week.

This vibrant community remains linked to Minnesota, both by its roots in Rochester and its friend Grace Strangis, the founder of Pathways to Children. Grace, one of 12 siblings from rural Minnesota has two Franciscan sisters. She founded Pathways to Children to support schools in Colombia, Ethiopia and India. She provides trips for students who share her passion for mission work. Unlike other mission programs, however, Grace recognizes those who give most abundantly are found in unlikely places…

The students at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School Minneapolis are also part of a unique program where students attend school four days a week and work the fifth. In exchange for tuition payments, students train for the professional world working in a variety of industries. 95% graduate from high school and nearly all enter college. However, the resume of these students does not begin to tell their story.

Last month, Pathways to Children brought 16 students from Cristo Rey across the Americas to learn about the culture of Colombia from CASFA students. These students were chosen from 80 applicants. When asked why they thought they were chosen, one said they may not know until the future. What is clear is they felt “chosen” not because they wrote a better essay or gave a better interview or had better grades or any other thing really-just Chosen. For some of them, it is probably the first time in their lives. As he got on the bus to go to the airport, one student handed his phone to a parent because “This is a trip of a lifetime and I don’t want to miss a minute of it!”

Stepping off the bus onto the grounds of CASFA, the Cristo Rey students noticed a giant magnolia tree that somehow survived the surrounding sea of concrete. Its single beautiful white bloom signified the positive outlook of the school community. The older students and certainly the younger ones, likely don’t know the purpose of the plastic sheeting on the classroom windows to prevent injury from shattering glass caused by car bomb attacks in the 80’s. More like a reunion than an introduction, the CASFA and Cristo Rey students became fast friends despite being from different schools, two countries, and four cultures: Colombian, American, Ecuadorian and Mexican. Their connectedness allowed them to pass over the first-meeting awkwardness and dig into the work. And they all gave as if they would never run out.

Early Thanksgiving morning the students headed up the mountain to build a playground out of old tires, paint, scraps of wood and rusty equipment. The work was heavy, hard and hot. In five hours they transformed a gravel lot into a fenced brightly painted park with its own decorated Christmas tree! Another day, students discussed political messages in music from both countries and took a CASFA student guided tour through Calle 26 known as the “street of murals” artists created to explain the peace process in the country’s 55-year civil war. Then they went back to work in the southern suburb of Soacha. This mining town grew from 200,000 to one million in the last seven years and it shows in the dusty streets surrounding the barrio’s single remaining tree. The students’ task was to paint an after school haven for kids whose only fresh water comes by truck once a month and whose school recess was discontinued because drugs were being thrown over the playground fence to entice them to trade.

After several hours of work, one of the women in the community arrived with a huge pot of soup ladled with a hand-carved wooden “cuchara” the size of a dinner plate. She planned to serve 50, but the steamy chicken and plantain broth aroma enticed those living nearby and the line grew. The woman did not stop ladling bowls until 150 people were fed. This modern “loaves and fishes” story serves as an apt metaphor for the students’ deep giving wells. They might not know why they were chosen for the trip, but later recalling this memory, perhaps they will say it was the hand of God on the ladle and sense a deeper meaning in their presence in this place.

Some wonder why those who have less often give more than those with more to give. How do CASFA teenagers walk up and down a mountain twice a day beginning at 6 am, work and attend class until 7 pm six days a week, have anything left to give? The nightly check in with Cristo Rey students took on a theme of humble wonderment at the hospitality, acceptance and love they felt in Bogota. Perhaps the answer lies in the Cristo Rey students’ capacity to receive the grace being offered. Therein lies the definition of CHOSEN.

Shelly Gill Murray has visited Colombia many times over the last 18 years and dedicates significant time to mission work, including work with Pathways To Children.

Mark Zimmermann, who edits the Catholic newspaper in Washington, D.C., has written a wonderful piece about his father, Wes Zimmermann age 83 of Barnhart, Missouri passed away Jan. 10.

By Mark Zimmermann

I’m back in my boyhood home in the woods of Missouri with my mom, trying to help however I can before we gather for my dad’s burial and pray that he is being welcomed home to the house of the Father, as Cardinal Ratzinger said at the Funeral Mass for St. John Paul II.

Dad took up the tools as a sheet metal worker, the family trade of my Grandpa Zimmermann, his four sons, my brother and several of our cousins. My father was a devout Catholic who knelt and prayed beside his bed each night, and he sacrificed to send each of his children to Catholic school, and helped us become the first generation of our family to attend college.

Dad always had time for his kids, and I remember many days when he’d come home tired from work, but still play badminton or ping pong with us, still wearing his work boots.

My dad was my hero, and I like to think the best parts of me came from lessons I learned from the example of faith, love and selflessness that he and my mom lived out quietly day in and day out.

About three years ago he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and it was hard to see such a sharp, witty, strong man become more and more frail and have difficulty putting his thoughts together. The books, movies and football games that he once enjoyed so much no longer mattered to him.

One of our favorite pastimes over the years was walking down the country road to the Mississippi River. I can remember when I was a little boy, riding on my dad’s shoulders up the last two hills on the way home from the river.

In the fall of 2013, I took a walk with my dad down our country road that I’ll never forget. This time, I tied his boots and buttoned his coat for him, and we set out. It was an idyllic fall day, and not just because the St. Louis Cardinals were in the World Series. The sky was a beautiful blue color, the air crisp, the leaves on the trees were in fall hues of yellow and orange, with some fluttering to the ground as we walked on, father and son, laughing and making small talk.

I hope heaven is like that, and we can walk together again on a glorious day, not ever wanting the walk to end.

The way the Minnesota vs. Seattle playoff game ended yesterday brought some surprisingly “religious” reactions from both Vikings and Seahawks players alike. One Seahawk bowed his face to the earth out of gratitude, while one Viking gazed at the heavens with agony and confusion in his eyes. Amazing how a playoff game as crazy as this one can evoke such spiritual energy in people.

The way we Vikings lost, so close, seconds away from a playoff win, surely must have had a reinforcing effect on our recurring memory of football failure which prompts musings such as, “Why can’t Minnesota Vikings eat soup? Because every time they get close to a bowl, they choke.” Yet the players responded to the resurgence of this nightmare with superstition and religiosity.

Will football failure, low football-self-esteem, and repeated treading upon the toes of our “Minnesota-niceness” bother us to the point that we Minnesotans begin to plead with the Lord for vindication?

I would like to suggest that to actually pray for a Superbowl win is not a ridiculous prayer, and is a prayer, if answered, that could both rekindle the faith of Minnesota in God and boost our confidence in the goodness of our identity as a little culture of orderly courtesy in traffic, smiles and greetings to passersby, proud customer service, and strong lifelong friendships.

Don’t just abandon ship and become a Packers fan because you can’t take repeated failure. Failure is purifying. Be proud of who we are. Be confident, and PRAY for a Superbowl win! Be not ashamed to do so, and God may vindicate us, with our help, and maybe a few more good draft picks. Skol Vikings!

Chris Vance, 21, is a seminarian from St. Joseph, West St. Paul, studying at St. John Vianney College Seminary in St. Paul.